Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

You cannot bounce back from hardship. You can only move through it. There is a path through pain to wisdom, through suffering to strength, and through fear to courage if we have the virtue of resilience. In 2012, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn’t seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he’d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help. Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, as Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel - and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives.

Oliver Nielsen says:"Finally a book about productivity that delivers!"

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

In This Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

In this book, Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy, explains the transition to what he describes as "crowd-based capitalism" - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. As peer-to-peer commercial exchange blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, how will the economy, government regulation, what it means to have a job, and our social fabric be affected?

A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this "beautiful question". With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek's groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature.

Emotional Resilience: How to be Agile, Adaptable and Perform at Your Best

This is the first comprehensive practical book on developing emotional resilience. Pressure, stress and annoying problems are all part of life, especially at work. By developing your emotional resilience you can be bulletproof, prepare yourself against even the most challenging situations, and focus fully on achieving your goals, getting things done, moving ahead and being the best you can be.

The Resilience Breakthrough: 27 Tools for Turning Adversity into Action

In The Resilience Breakthrough, Moore delivers a practical primer on how you can become more resilient in a world of instability and narrowing opportunity, whether you're facing financial troubles, health setbacks, challenges on the job, or any other problem. We can each have our own resilience breakthrough, Moore argues, and can each learn how to use adverse circumstances as potent fuel for overcoming life's hardships.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be

Power is shifting - from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. But power is also changing, becoming harder to use and easier to lose. As a result, argues award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, all leaders have less power than their predecessors, and the potential for upheaval is unprecedented.

Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil's Advocate, the 11th-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams - comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors - are used widely in both the public and private sector.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage.

Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain

Between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, the brain changes in important and, at times, challenging ways. In Brainstorm, the renowned psychiatrist and bestselling author of Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole-Brain Child, and Mindsight, Daniel Siegel busts a number of commonly held myths about adolescence — for example, that it is merely a stage of “immaturity” filled with often “crazy” behavior — to reveal how it is in fact a vital time in our lives in terms of charting the course for the adults we ultimately become.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive, and you'll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility - emotional agility.

BBQ Fan says:"Excellent subject but listening is not everyone's cup of tea"

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong

Building resilience - the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively - is an urgent social and economic issue. Our interconnected world is susceptible to sudden and dramatic shocks and stresses: a cyber-attack, a new strain of virus, a structural failure, a violent storm, a civil disturbance, an economic blow. Judith Rodin shows how people, organizations, businesses, communities, and cities have developed resilience in the face of otherwise catastrophic challenges.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - A 30-Minute Summary

With Instaread Summaries, you can get the summary of a book in 30 minutes or less. We read every chapter, summarize, and analyze it for your convenience. This is an Instaread Summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives. In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life.

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries, from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world--they did not understand what there is to understand or how to understand it.

Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering

Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wish we did not? For decades, New York Times best-selling author Dr. David A. Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon - capture - is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.

Publisher's Summary

Katrina. Haiti. BP. Fukushima. The Great Recession. Those are just a few of the catastrophic disruptions the world has endured in recent years. As we try to respond to such crises, key questions arise: What causes one system to break under great stress and another to rebound? How much change can a complex system absorb while still retaining its purpose and function? What characteristics make it adaptive to change?

Through original reporting ranging across disciplines including finance, neuroscience, oceanography, and social psychology, the authors explore how in answering these questions, the new science of resilience can help our institutions become more sustainable, enduring, and humane in the face of cataclysmic events. Provocative and eye-opening, Resilience sheds light on the multifaceted nature of change and gives readers access to cutting-edge tools - developed by the leading thinkers of our time - to help us adapt to an ever-evolving world rather than fall prey to its unpredictability.

What the Critics Say

"In an increasingly complex world, we can't avoid shocks - we can only build better shock absorbers. This is a brilliant exploration of how best to do that, told with compelling examples and stories." (Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, best-selling author of The Long Tail)

"[Helps] us all understand the importance of planning for the future, even when it means giving up some short-term gains." (Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, author of Predictably Irrational)

"Smart and sophisticated, this is a landmark work in a new field. If you are part of a system that wants to avoid collapse, read this book." (David Eagleman, Neuroscientist, author of Incognito and Why the Net Matters)

The title should have been "Disillusionment: Bizarre Behavior From the Fringe"

This is not a book about resilience. It is almost about the opposite. The author focuses on individuals, societies, and species that have NOT adapted well to modern world and he details the exhaustive efforts required to sustain them. At one point, the author suggests that during the housing market collapse in 2008, world bankers should have colluded to keep ALL the bad banks afloat. Collusion for crisis-avoidance is NOT resilience.

The book looks at people who design elaborate schemes to solve very local problems that simply do not apply everywhere. Although these people are admirable for sure...they are the exceptions and their complicated measures could never be applied to six billion people. And ultimately, their story is not what I signed on for when I bought this book. Spend your credit somewhere else.

Aside:True resilience occurs DURING a crisis in ways you or I could not imagine. Resilience emerges from untidy and terrible circumstances. It???s dark and traumatic. Resilience stands out in that NOT all survive the crisis (literally or figuratively). Resilience cannot be simply programmed into everyone like a line of computer code. The author???s true aim is for everyone to be programmed as resilient to avoid future calamities. It???s a paradox. To achieve this, the author begins to confuse resilience with CONTROL OF RESOURCES. To achieve THAT, he would also need to eliminate disagreement and opposing viewpoints over the use of those resources. Avoiding a crisis is NOT resilience. It???s the antithesis of what CREATES resilience.

Unpredictable things are just that...unpredictable. Even the most extreme preventive measures are vulnerable to the same unpredictability and failure.

Super narration! Resilience does a great job of laying out the benefits of crowdsourcing and symbiosis in nature and humanity. Tons of great examples of what prevents total catastrophe, as well as strategies for rapid recovery when things go wrong.

I found this book almost disturbingly slow and downright boring in the beginning, and indeed at certain points further along. It was way too long-winded, and talk about belabouring the obvious! However, some very very cool insights and pieces of information eventually popped out, which made the listen worthwhile. An oft very enjoyable writing style, plus excellent narration - both of which got better and better as the book progressed, also made a big difference. I am very happy that I stuck with it, as by the end, I actually loved the book. At some point I may acquire the hard copy to savour the good bits again.

There's a lot of good information in this book and it offers much food for thought I'm going to have to listen to it again. I wish they would give a discount on buying the hard copy or Kindle once you've purchased audible. The book flowed and I enjoyed it.

Imagine and Your Brain at Work - brings together several disciplines to better understand behavior and insight.

What does Sean Runnette bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Great at adding life to the stories through different accents and compelling story-telling.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, needs to be spread out over time - deep messages that require deeper contemplation. Good to review chapters - this is a layered book best consumed in several iterations.

Any additional comments?

A thought-provoking book that looks at resilience from a very holistic perspective. A great read for corporate executives looking to increase their resilience and agility in the face of change. It's an equally great read for military and civic leaders hoping to spur cooperation in the face of terrorism or natural disasters. It strips individual and collective behavior to its core - the biological underpinnings of basic human emotions and their impact on trust and cooperation.

It shares some unique perspectives on the power of diversity and holistic thinking and why its is more sustainable and resilient than insular or tribal thinking. It gives us glimpses into rationalization in game theory outcomes, hypothesizes potential reasons for the failure of Wall Street tycoons to cooperative in the face of a global economic crisis, and inspires with stories about the power of crowd-sourcing in the face of natural disasters like Haiti.

Anyone who reads this book can't help but broaden their thinking. Despite deep dives into highly technical concepts such as mortgage-backed securities or biological diversity, I encourage readers to persevere - the reward is well worth the discomfort of the temporary mental gymnastics required to grasp these concepts and see how they are interconnected.

Comparable to "Switch: How to change things when change is hard" by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Which scene was your favorite?

There were a few memorable stories but the one that recounted the story when bankers had to decide whether to save Lehman Brothers or not was great. Also the whole story of one mans quest to save the orangutan through various methods was inspirational as well as thought provoking.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No. It was one of those books that one wishes to pause at certain break points to ponder what one read. It was a book I went back and listened to again.

Any additional comments?

With the current world economic and environmental conditions, this book gets right down into the foundation of resilience, a skill worth having.